Work Text:
“Y’know, I was almost attacked by a shark once.”
She shares this with him as they pass through the shark tunnel. Early morning, the aquarium is full of young parents and their children. They stick out like sore thumbs, wandering from exhibit to exhibit, bumping shoulders and hands in a way that feels too intimate for just colleagues.
The aquarium smells like fishy water and rubbery pretzels, nauseating as they pass the food court and circle the tanks. He hangs back while Emma takes videos of the rainbow-colored fish, reads every plaque, and peppers the attendants with questions. She has been looking for a salamander all day, to no avail, and they finally pour into the shark exhibit, children running through screaming, and Emma just beams at them and the parents, exchanging jokes but not, with knowing looks but not.
Emma loves kids.
Brendon has never felt the pull.
It is not until they are alone in the tunnel, her camera angled at the curved ceiling, that she shares this latest tidbit with him. Casual as her theater history.
Her words hit the surface, a bobber and a line.
It is the sort of cold open he could easily see on a dating app. Not an in-person conversation.
Still, his teeth flirt with the hook.
“What?”
She smiles in response, closed-lipped and pleased with herself.
She has her hair loose today. He is used to it by now, but the process had been a wonder to watch, shoulder to shoulder in his bathroom this morning as she took her hair down, curls pouring over her neck, brushing the midwing of her scapula, and pinned half-up with a ribbon clip. Baby blue.
It matches her knit cardigan, sliding off her shoulders, pooling at her elbows. And all compliments dried on his tongue as she walked into the living room.
They passed a group of teenage girls on their way in, and they had gushed and complimented her for him. Adoring the color coordination, the bow, and the eyelet sundress she wore, even though it was still too cold out.
And he hasn’t been able to relax about it.
Especially not in public when eyes pass over her, lock on him, and pause. Considering. Suspecting.
Her hand brushes his in the ticket line, and he makes a grab for his wallet, busying himself with his card, only to be reminded that it is a free day.
She nods. “Oh, yeah.”
And nothing more. Her attention is back on the sharks above, trying to catch the best photo, zooming in and out with the drifting shapes. Ignoring him, as she had months ago in the ED. Sentences terse and clinical where there used to be rosy warmth.
A firm this is where I am, and this is where you’ll meet me, that kept him in limbo, the tentative ties unraveling. Teeth snapping.
She is goading him. Making him bite.
“How did that happen?”
She tucks her phone away in her back pocket, the same way he does, and leans back against the ledge lining the thick glass walls. A shadow passes over her, cutting off the blue. A Blacktip Reef slides its belly over the glass. Emma’s face lifts to watch it swim by.
So much awe.
“When I was thirteen,” she says, summoning the story with clasped hands. “We went on vacation to South Carolina to stay with family. In the Isle of Palm. It’s one of those places where it's swamp on one side of the road and sea on the other. I remember we drove the whole way down in a day. By the time we got there, it was dark, and my sister and I were running across the sand, buying chicken sandwiches from the street vendors and breathing in the salt.”
He nods along, hands sinking deeper in his pockets.
“The next day, we woke up early and went out with my uncle and cousins. I wasn’t a strong swimmer, so I couldn’t go deeper than knee height, but as the day went on, the tide got deeper, and we got more confident.”
“My uncle was fishing off the dock and watching us. We were swimming below, scaring away all the fish and calling out to him, and then I remember he got this funny look on his face, and he told me to come here.” Emma makes a stern face and a gesture, come hither, that Brandon tracks with his eyes. “There was a ladder on the side of the dock, and my sister had already climbed up, so I swam over, laughing, and he kept telling me, ‘come here, go slow, come here.’”
“I didn’t think anything of it at the time. We had all been playing in the water all day, and I was the last one in. I figured he was going to splash me for annoying him. But as soon as I got a hand on the ladder, he reached down and grabbed me. Pulled me right up. I was so confused, and then he pointed and said, ‘There’s a shark down there’.”
He hangs on the dip in her voice. Her pantomime of snatch and grab. Staring at the ghost in the carpet.
“Was there?”
“There was.” She says, astonished. “I looked down, and I could see the shape of it. Right where I was. It was the size of a dog. I had no idea.” Her eyes drift again from his mouth to his brow. “He didn’t want me panicking, so he pretended like it was all okay until I was out of the water.”
The story settles ill in his stomach. Some foreign material, he does not know what to do with. Bone splinters. He feels oddly somber at the alternative – Emma with a bite, a family vacation forever scarred. Possibilities of what could have but didn’t.
Another family passes by with a stroller, parking a little further down the tunnel from them. Snapping photos. Baby voices.
“Did you get back in the water after that?”
He can imagine her from those photos he’s seen of her from middle school. Hair teased up with salty air. Parked on the sandy shore with a book and a Snapple, letting the day pass over her.
He can also imagine her – the her he knows from work, the her under the softness – crashing back into the waves, screaming with her cousins.
“Of course.” She says, smiling, blue light flashing over her cheek. She is bathed in it. “I always tell that story, but I don’t think the shark would have attacked me, you know?”
She is right, in the statistical sense. Sharks are docile creatures in the shallow, but there are always outliers. Incidents.
He imagines teeth grazing against her smooth ankle.
His teeth.
Sliding from midcalf to the bend of her knee. Eyes locked.
Her deep brown eyes and every individual lash burned into his mind.
He has been a terrible date.
His head has been on a swivel all afternoon, skimming the crowd for familiar faces. He tells himself it’s because he wants privacy for them. That he is not ready to talk about them yet, if there even is a them.
Not dating because he cannot justify it. Not not-dating because she keeps hanging around.
And it’s wrong. It feels so wrong to be eating up her time like this. Even if she says to the contrary. She wastes her off days with him, leading him through the grocery store, picking through his movie collection, walking around his apartment in fuzzy socks and his old tee shirts. Her toothbrush next to his. Her favorite coffee creamer in his fridge. Her slippers at the door.
Staging a gentle takeover. Hostile when she finds his cigarettes.
But gentle when she sits with him on his balcony after they’ve had a long shift, letting his smoke and silence sink into her skin. Her hand on the back of his neck like it belongs there. Saying nothing.
But she bleeds into him, as he bleeds into her.
Dulling his teeth.
Pulling him to shore.
He leans on the ledge with her, hip to hip. Her face tips to the ceiling, and he looks with her, watching the cloudy shapes and sleek bodies, moving. Always moving. Her hand touches the bend of his arm, sinking along the inside of his elbow, and cupping his bicep in her palm.
Easy as breathing.
Her temple rests against his shoulder. “Do you want to go?”
She doesn’t say home because that would indicate his place, which makes him lock up, and she will get annoyed and quiet with him if he points it out. Even though he is thinking the same thing.
It’s annoying.
And not her problem.
“What about your salamander?” He asks, remembering the several photos she showed him of sleek creatures of pink and white. Grasping webbed toes. Small smiling mouths.
Freakish in a way of nightmares.
But fascinating when she turned over in bed and showed him videos of gummy regrown limbs and bioluminescence.
“The axolotl?” She prompts, a word he would not have been able to grasp out of thin air, but nods. “Oh, yeah, he’s supposed to be in Kid’s Kingdom.” She says it like a terminal diagnosis. His benefit. Not hers.
Her being so careful with him, like he is the shark circling in the shallow.
“Let’s go see it.”
And she lights up. Her coming back up to the surface. Her hand slides down his arm and into his palm. He answers her grip with his.